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Rallying Around a Bowl of Rice

Danielle Chang, founder of LuckyRice.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

If smells could tell a story, the meaty aroma of sizzling dumplings might explain how Danielle Chang, 41, a petite mother of two, founded LuckyRice, a popular Asian food festival in New York that has spread to four other cities.

On a recent Wednesday, at her two-bedroom apartment in NoLIta, Ms. Chang, in high heels and a red Thomas Sires dress, was frying up a few, while explaining why this year’s festival, which starts April 29, will feature the latest culinary fad: fermented foods. “Those are the parts about Asian food that people were always embarrassed to show,” she said. “I think they smell good.”

Non-Asian-Americans, she said, who once stuck to Anglicized dishes like General Tso’s chicken, are more adventurous now, thanks to a new food culture that rhapsodizes anything exotic or authentic.

It’s ripe timing for LuckyRice, whose founding culinary council includes star chefs like Masaharu Morimoto, David Chang, Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. (Ms. Chang said she pitched them cold and was surprised at how receptive they were. “The welcome mat was out there,” she said.)

This year’s festival lineup starts with a dumpling party hosted by Danny Bowien of Mission Chinese (a ringleader of so-called Asian hipster cuisine) and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem fame. That will be followed by a ramen Slurpfest, a night market with fermented foods, and a dim-sum mah-jongg Bloody Mary brunch hosted by Susur Lee. If some events seem kitschy, that’s the point. “Food is the epicenter of culture now,” Ms. Chang said. “People aren’t spending their time at art openings, they’re going to the latest restaurant or cocktail bar.”

Not that Ms. Chang counts herself among the trailblazers. Although her résumé hopscotches the globe and industries, she has no professional culinary experience. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, the oldest of three children, she moved around a lot with her family, first to Guam when she was 5, then to Los Angeles, Houston and eventually Los Altos Hills near Palo Alto, Calif.

Her mother, Ching Ping Chang, an interior designer, still lives in the Bay Area. Her father, Jason C. S. Chang, lives in Shanghai, and as the chairman and chief executive of Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, ranks No. 868 on the Forbes billionaires list this year. She said her family is “very private.”

The children went the creative route. Ms. Chang’s younger brother, Rutherford, is an artist who splits his time between New York and Shanghai, while her younger sister, Madeline, followed their mother’s footsteps and is an interior designer living in TriBeCa. Ms. Chang said she’s very much the older sister: “I’ve always been bossy.”

After graduating from Barnard, she first tried journalism as a clerk at The New York Times. Then she tried her hand at being an art curator. Unsure of her next step, she got her master’s degree in critical theory at Columbia, then moved to Hong Kong in 1998 to intern at Goldman Sachs, where she was eventually hired.

She moved back to New York in 2000 and started a lifestyle magazine called Simplycity (with six Goldman partners as investors), which ended two years later. During that time, she met Todd Leong, a documentary filmmaker, whom she married in 2002.

Her next job was at the publishing house Assouline, but a year into it, she became pregnant with her first daughter and pulled back from the work force. She grew restless and took on consulting projects, including for the designer Vivienne Tam, whom she knew socially, before becoming the label’s chief executive.

That didn’t last long, either. A year later, in 2009, she started LuckyRice, which she first conceived of as a cultural side project. “I couldn’t believe that people didn’t know Asian food existed beyond sushi and ramen,” she said. The festival has since expanded nationally with sold-out dates in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Miami, and will be heading to San Francisco for the first time on Sept. 6.

“I’ve always wanted, as an Asian-American, to create a branded lifestyle of things I grew up with,” she said. She recounted how, 10 years ago, she and Lisa Ling, a TV journalist, tried to start a magazine called Red. “We shopped it around,” Ms. Chang said. “We thought it would be a crossover magazine, but then people kept pigeonholing it as an Asian-American-only magazine.”

Now, with a new generation of media-savvy Asian-Americans like Eddie Huang and Mr. Bowien, Ms. Chang said, there’s a growing audience for her ideas. “I had this Irish boyfriend once that wouldn’t eat any part of the meat that touched the bone,” she said. “Look at how things have changed. Kimchi is part of the vocabulary now.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 18, 2013, on page E7 of the New York edition with the headline: Rallying Around a Bowl of Rice. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe